Author: Paul Mercina, Director Product Management, Park Place Technologies

Even the youngest IT pro has experienced it. Maybe it was that first gray hair or the feeling of puzzlement when confronted with the term hodl. Suddenly it’s clear that we, too, are getting older.

Today, cloud services providers (CSPs) are facing their own signs of aging. The problems for maturing CSPs and their data centre operations include:

• Support complexity. Greater OEM variety within and between CSP data centres results in more warranties to manage and a more fraught support process involving multiple OEMs. It’s not the picture of efficiency or fast, effective problem response.
• Lifecycle management issues. Aging hardware with increasing support costs can push CSPs to make premature investments in new equipment, forgoing the full value and ROI residing on the floor today. This can put a company at a competitive disadvantage.
• Talent crunch. Data centre complexity also complicates human resources, as it becomes more difficult to attract and retain the full spectrum of expertise required.
• Price pressures. A commoditising CSP market combined with a talent shortage are working at cross-purposes, pushing prices down but staffing costs up. CSPs are looking for new solutions to trim spending so they can survive and grow.

Getting older should entail getting wiser. For CSPs, smarter support decisions involving third party maintenance can be the answer they’ve been looking for controlling data centre costs and sticking around for another decade and more.

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